Seán D. Naylor was an intelligence and counterterrorism senior staff writer for Foreign Policy. He is the author of Relentless Strike – The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (St. Martin’s Press).
He previously spent 23 years as a writer for Army Times, where his principal beat was special operations forces. He also covered combat operations, exercises, training, readiness, weapons systems, force modernization and the Army's senior leadership.
Naylor received his bachelor's degree in journalism from Boston University in 1988 and a Master of Arts in International Relations from the same institution in 1990. In 1987 he traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan as a freelance reporter covering the Afghan mujahideen, meeting and conversing with Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Hamid Karzai, among others.
For Army Times, Naylor covered military operations as an embedded reporter in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
His coverage of 2002’s Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan earned him the White House Correspondents Association’s 2003 Edgar A. Poe award for excellence in reporting an issue of regional or national importance. It also led to a best-selling book, Not A Good Day To Die – The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda, published in March 2005 by Berkley Books, New York, N.Y. Naylor is also the co-author, with Tom Donnelly, of Clash of Chariots – The Great Tank Battles, published by Berkley to favorable reviews in 1996.
Born in Canada, and raised in England and Ireland, Naylor became a U.S. citizen on March 14, 2000. He lives in Washington D.C. on Capitol Hill, reluctantly hung up his rugby boots 15 years ago after a 25-year playing career, and is an avid soccer fan.
FILE - In this file photo taken Thursday, June 19, 2014, Islamic State group militants stand with a captured Iraqi army Humvee at a checkpoint outside Beiji refinery, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq. It took 30 days as Lt. Gen. Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi's force made an agonizingly slow journey for 40 kilometers (25 miles) through roadside bombs and suicide car attacks, then successfully laid siege to the oil refinery city of Beiji. The campaign earned al-Saadi the biggest battlefield victory by Iraqi forces since the military collapsed as Islamic State fighters swept over most of northern and western Iraq in a summer blitz. (AP Photo, File)
A Kurdish Peshmerga fighter, with an image of the US flag sewn onto his shirt sleeve, stands next to an ambulance destroyed due to an improvised explosive device (IED) in Hossein, during the clashes on the road to Jalawla, on August 23, 2014. The United States launched an air campaign against IS in Iraq on April 8, and has since carried out more than 90 strikes that have largely been in support of Kurdish forces in the north, drawing calls for operations elsewhere in the country. AFP PHOTO / JM LOPEZ (Photo credit should read JM LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
TAJI, IRAQ - APRIL 12: A U.S. Army trainer (L), instructs an Iraqi Army recruit at a military base on April 12, 2015 in Taji, Iraq. U.S. forces, currently operating in 5 large bases throught the country, are training thousands of Iraqi Army combat troops, trying to rebuild a force they had origninally trained before the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2010. Members of the U.S. Army's 5-73 CAV, 3BCT, 82nd Airborne Division are teaching members of the newly-formed 15th Division of the Iraqi Army, as the Iraqi government launches offensives to try to recover territory lost to ISIS last year. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
Pakistani security personnel measure a wall outside the hideout house of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following his death by US Special Forces in a ground operation in Abbottabad on May 3, 2011. The bullet-riddled Pakistani villa that hid Osama bin Laden from the world was put under police control, as media sought to glimpse the debris left by the US raid that killed him. Bin Laden's hideout had been kept under tight army control after the dramatic raid by US special forces late May 1 in the affluent suburbs of Abbottabad, a garrison city 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Islamabad. AFP PHOTO/ AAMIR QURESHI (Photo credit should read AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images)
